Front Seat

Hugh and Cecily Branksome retire to the seaside town where they grew up. Cecily wanted it; Hugh had his objections and lost. They are a settled, comfortable pair, and the town is supposed to be their reward for a working life. The town holds their childhoods, and neither of them is prepared for what else it holds. Nostalgia and unresolved business come with the move, and the unresolved business arrives in human form early on: Arnold Cottle, Cecily's old boyfriend, boorish as ever, back in her orbit.

Then the past starts calling properly. Cecily's late father was a local alderman, and he gifted a public seat to the town. When Cecily goes to look at it, she finds the bench destroyed and replaced by another one, this one given by a man suspected of murder. It is the kind of small, odd detail that a good mystery is built from, and it bothers Cecily enough to turn her into an investigator. With Arnold's help, she starts digging into an unsolved murder from thirty years ago, and the seaside town turns out to be smaller than it looks.

Alex Ferguson wrote it, Sandy Johnson directed. Janet Suzman plays Cecily and Edward Hardwicke plays Hugh; Richard Johnson is Arnold Cottle, with Joyce Redman as Mrs. Jones. The rest of the cast fills out the town: Danny Spring as a young bartender, David Trevena as a man in the toilet, Edward Clayton as the landlord, David Huntington as Rupert, Griff Mellhuish as Ralph and Shari Hughes as Alice. It aired on 21 February 1997.

There is a quiet satisfaction in watching a retired couple take on a thirty-year-old murder because of a bench. The bench was her father's gift to the town, and something about its replacement has offended a loyalty Cecily did not know she still carried. Retirement, it turns out, does not shield anyone from the pull of local secrets, and Cecily is not the type to leave them alone.